Leafshine: Lust for Flower

WoW RSS Reboot

The problem with dropping out of WoW life for about 18 months is that certain things have just gone away. Like my guild, for example - but more on that later.

Another thing that went away completely was Google Reader - killed off last year by the Big G. Luckily, I had the foresight to take a few minutes to dump out my RSS subscriptions via Google Takeout, and I had them safely stored away in my Dropbox. 

So, one quick sign-up with Feedly later, and my feeds are coming in…

Wrangle that XML…

 

The joy of OPML

Now my old WoW RSS feeds are up and running again, and looking rather magazine-like:

WoW blogs in Feedly

Except…

It's as if 1,000 blogs cried out and were silenced

Well, a lot of them have died. I've always known that the attrition rate amongst WoW bloggers is high, but it has been utterly brutal in the 18 months since I was last reading them regulalrly. It looks like the vast majority of the blogs in my reader are defunct, or on very long term hiatus. 

And there's worse than that. Some of them have gone away and been replaced by… something else. The defunct Mama Druid now looks like this:

Mama Druid no more

And the wonderfully named Laser Chicken is now, well, foreign to me…

Parlez vous Anglais?

Time to rebuild. Any recommendations?

Progress is being made…

Whatever happened to Leafshine?

Getting wood in Pandaria - old style

What the hell happened to Leafshine?

Dammit, this blog is over five years old - and it missed its half decade anniversary. Silence has reigned for months, with only occasional bursts of activity. What is happening here?

Well, the major reason for silence over the last six months can be summed up thus:

 

I'm on your blog, Daddy!

Yes, Dr. Leafy and I had our first child back in the summer and - while I had intial hopes that life might return to something like normal (hence the "countdown posts" that went nowhere…) - it changes everything. Free time has been at a major premium, and WoW has all but vanished off my agenda.

 

Our baby daughter isn't entirely to blame. Just over a year ago, I was made redundant from a job I loved, managing a network of 100+ business blogs, and training journalists in online skills. I finally made the decision to try and build a freelance and conultancy career. That's been going well - but there have been extended periods where I haven't been able to give myself permission to do anything apart from try and build that career. Rethinking your working lifestyle is hard enough on its own, but when you combine it with having a child and buying a new house, well, 2012 was most certainly an "interesting" time for me.

So, here we are, in 2013, with a beautiful baby girl, a wonderful new house by the sea, and a great new way of working. Where does that leave WoW?

As is stands, Leafy is level… 86. Yes, nearly two patches into the expansion, I've managed a whole measly level. Yet, in the last couple of weeks, I've done nearly half a level on top of that. Things are shifting; my daughter is sleeping better, there are fewer demands on our time and I feel more free to spend time on fun activities.

Heck, I've even played with my daughter on my knee a few times. She's figured out the space bar and what it does, so all of a sudden Leafshine has turned into one of those Night Elves. Ah, well. 

So, no promises of a return to blogging here. No grandiose plans. Just a quick checkin to explain, and let your know that things are shifting a little…

How have you all been? 

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Head shot!

From the official WoW blog:

Once we decided to no longer offer new head enchants, we made the older ones non-functional to eliminate giving players the feeling that they had to go back to older content or miss out on a little bit more power. Head gear is simply no longer enchantable, and you now have one less required step to get a piece of loot ready to wear.

Hurrah for reducing "forced" faction grinds. And double hurrah for ensuring that you don't have to go back a grind expired content just because your raid leader is a min-maxing dick… ;-)